Outside the Classroom: Ms. Victor
“I really like to think about making art as not a career, [but] as something I’m doing because I love it,” Ms. Victor shared on how art takes a place in her life. Outside of the classroom, Ms. Victor considers herself a fine artist (as opposed to a commercial artist).
Some of her most recent pieces are freestanding objects or objects attached to the wall. They are generally smaller pieces that could fit in a home comfortably. Ms. Victor described that these are more intimate as opposed to larger impersonal pieces that are often displayed in galleries. The size of the sculpture inserts, “intimacy into the encounter with you and the object.”
She mentions that whatever sculpture she is working on at the moment tends to be her favorite. One of the most recent is, what she described as, two thin tubes inserted into the wall, a piece influenced by Geta Brătescu. Geta Brătescu is a Romanian artist born in 1926 whose work focuses on illustrations, photography, and performance. The interpretation could be of eyes, finger holes, or plugs. Corresponding with the idea of domestic space, the sculpture is of a smaller size.
A second sculpture consists of two wired sculptures with similar forms but physically different. One resembles a mousetrap and is seated on a cloth on a table. The other is attached to a wall and looks like hardware. Both of these are supposed to have “some points of familiarity” and “some points of abstraction” in the way they are exhibited and interpreted in the space. While it may hold some similarity to a necklace or a wire contraption, fundamentally it is just a sculpture.
Ms. Victor went to a math and science oriented high school, but studied printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) for college. She worked in a printmaking shop, then in a gallery, and soon after went to graduate school at Yale University for her M.F.A. in painting. She then worked as an adjunct, a freelance teacher for around 4 years.
Ms. Victor also mentioned the difficulty of managing work, family, and time to create art. She is often influenced by her environment and how her schedule allows her to work on her pieces. She says art is supposed to remind one of other things, and the whole experience is about looking at the sculpture and getting close to it. While a piece may look like “it could hurt you,” or look beautiful, the effect of the piece is centered around the individual’s interaction with it and the realization that it is just a sculpture.
